What’s on the agenda for Velocity Europe

Steve Souders previews Velocity Europe 2011.

Velocity Europe is less than two weeks away. It’s happening November 8-9 in Berlin at the Hotel Maritim ProArte. I’ve heard good things about the venue and am excited to get there and check it out.

This event has been a long time coming. A handful of web performance and operations savants (including members of the Program Committee) have been encouraging us for years to bring Velocity to Europe, and now it’s actually happening. And (drum roll please) the price is only EUR 600 (excl. VAT) if you use the 20% discount code veu11sts.

Jon Jenkins from Amazon.com is talking about their approach to the challenges of mobile browsing. Jon is the Director of Software Development for Amazon Silk. I’m looking forward to more details about Silk’s split architecture.

Tim Morrow delivers the background for Betfair’s promise to deliver a fast experience to their customers, and their progress on that promise.

Theo Schlossnagle is a recognized leader at Velocity. He’s giving two talks on web operations careers and monitoring.

Estelle Weyl joins Velocity for the first time talking about the nuances of mobile rendering performance. I learn something new every time I hear Estelle speak, so I’m excited to welcome her to Velocity.

Ivo Teel discusses the balance we all face between features and performance and how they’re handling that at Spil Games.

Jeff Veen knows the importance of third-party performance and availability as the CEO of Typekit. Jeff is an amazing, engaging speaker. Reading his session description gave me goosebumps with anticipation: “Jeff sat on a couch in the Typekit offices, staring out the window, and wondering if everything their company had been working towards was about to slip through their fingers …“

I want to give a shout out to the Velocity Europe Program Committee: Patrick Debois, Aaron Peters, Schlomo Schapiro, Jeroen Tjepkema, and Sean Treadway. They’ve participated in numerous video concalls (yay Google Hangouts!) to review proposals, build the program, and shape Velocity to be a European conference. And they might have one more card up their sleeve – more on that later.

If you’re heading to Berlin you should also check out CounchConf Berlin on Nov 7. NoSQL has great performance benefits and Couchbase is a good choice for many mobile apps. Use couchconf_discount for 10% off registration.

The last time I was in Berlin was for JSConf.eu 2009. The city had a high-tech vibe and the crowd was extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic. I’m excited to get back to Berlin for Velocity Europe and do the web performance and operations deep dives that are the core of Velocity. If you want to have a website that’s always fast and always up, Velocity Europe is the place to be. I hope to see you there.

Velocity Europe, being held Nov. 8-9 in Berlin, will bring together the web operations and performance communities for two days of critical training, best practices, and case studies.